The Smithsonian’s design museum, the Cooper-Hewitt, has announced its plan to create a clone of itself online that anybody can mess with, not just curators and administrators. Visitors will be able to curate shows in the online space, create digital collections, and fill in tips for curators about works that “have yet to be researched fully,” Wiki-style.

The Goog tried doing something like this a few years back that was going to be an online space for online art, but gave it up in the prototype phase. The Cooper-Hewitt doesn’t want to say when its virtual sibling will be born, but an “interactive educational” component will appear in October.

These anti-institutional outcroppings increasingly attached to institutions in some online form often sound simultaneously utopic and apocalyptic. They promise something democratic, but they also undermine genuine experts, and I have to wonder whether this people’s-choice uprising we see in the arts would fly in medicine or science. We’d have to accept a certain amount of paternalism to understand why, when there’s a by-demand collection of images online, the online lineup shouldn’t simply dictate what goes on the actual walls.